You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Book’ tag.
Tag Archive
Booklikemarks
November 12, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Abandon, Art, Book, Loss, Love, Separation | by davidbdale | 3 comments
Thin strips of card stock, a pharmacy receipt, a suicide king: bookmarks all. Metaphors for my placeholder finger, they separate the pages I have read from those I may never read. Half-solved puzzles mystify me even as I mark my place in stories that no longer interest me. A photograph of my lost love reminds me that I was once lovable; a summons from an officer of the court commands me to give testimony for what I’ve done or thought or been. They substitute for my hand between the pages where I’ve stuck them, separating my Crime from the Punishment I hope to delay forever by reading no further. The reviews aren’t good. Because of what I haven’t seen, my Emma Bovary’s toying with her Leon still; she hasn’t met, may never meet and betray me with her Rodolphe. Raskolnikov at the pawnbroker’s shop stands forever, axe above his head, declaring his moral superiority. And finally, until you compel me to bear witness in yours, mine is The Tale of One City. The day we were to marry, you responded to something loud—a starter’s pistol? a biological alarm clock?—and sprinted down that aisle, vaulted the flower girl, grabbed a ring and a meaningless kiss and flung the bouquet like a baton over your shoulder on your way toward making a life for yourself. Since then I’ve been sidelined here, abandoning project after project, Doctor Jekyll and whatever comes after, I quit them before they can hurt me. But now, you say, you need commitment and bold action from a man who stops at open doors. Listening to it ring, I stand here hand on phone, not trusting that you need me or for how many pages and terrified that it might be time to start another chapter.
Copyright © 1999
Eat the Air
October 24, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Book, Dystopia, History, Holocaust, Memory, Rabbi, Song, War | by davidbdale | 7 comments
The rabbi is on radio, telling the story every generation tells about itself. It was war, he says, and the papers didn’t reach our little town. Those who found the odd edition and dared to read it, couldn’t risk sharing what they had read. The libraries lay in rubble. To own a radio was a capital offense. A man I knew, says the rabbi, was executed for pissing his name in the snow: publisher, they called him, publisher of seditious material. There was no news, except that we had no heat, no food. Instead of meals, we sang songs of plenty, songs of love and youth and of a good and forgiving god who always was, and always would be, this fruitful world. When we were bereft of everything, they took our maps and the books we had hidden, which were also maps. For all we knew, we were the only people of our kind left on earth. We told each other stories from the holy books. My father the rabbi, says the rabbi, knew many verses by heart; I remembered only songs, and only my personal versions. I sought others who knew the same songs, so we could reclaim and rewrite them on the air. It was not yet forbidden to converse. Some remembered parables, others prayers, lessons, pages of text once memorized and still intact. When memories were in conflict, a practical consensus informed us, and soon new books emerged, with an urgency missing from the old books. All the while, the world was writing chapters of its own, about places that had no names until we were taken there, whose names are now unspeakable. We understand history, who had to write our own while we were surviving it. Nothing written on paper can ever disprove us.
Copyright ©1997
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…